American Express charge backs, merchants win the majority of the time!

When talking to American Express card holders, what is it the most common thing you'll hear them say? I hear it almost anytime the conversation comes up, "I love using my American Express because if I ever have a problem with a merchant I'll just file a charge back and get my money back". This is one of the biggest misconceptions that Amex card holders have. In fact, a recent research study conducted by American Express themselves shows that merchants actually win charge back disputes more often than card holders do.

Being an American Express merchant for several of my business, I love accepting Amex, in fact, I'd rather have a customer use their Amex card than any other card, reasons are simple:

• Flat %, no "none qualified markups" live Visa & MC
• Amex card members just spend more, it's an indisputable fact
• Lower decline rate on service renewals
• No monthly fee to accept the card
• Very easy charge back resolution
• Excellent customer service

For these reasons alone, I'd prefer clients to use an Amex.

Completed conversion to a fully digital office, using Google Docs

I promise Google is not the only thing I’m going to blog about! I’m just very excited to announce that we’ve just completed a successful transition to a fully digitized office using Google Docs. By default, Google Docs (which is included with Google Apps Premier for business) provides the user with 1GB of storage space, unless you convert your documents to Google Docs format, in which case the storage of that specific file does not count towards your 1GB of storage allowance.

Initially what we decided to do in the beginning of this year, was instead of printing out our receipts and keeping a physical copy like we’ve done in the past, we decide to keep digital copies of all invoices. If an invoice was emailed to us (95% of the time it is) we would simply save the file on a computer instead of printing it, hey, we’re helping the environment too! Then about a week into it, came the realization that what if the computer being used has a hard drive failure or gets stolen etc.. we didn’t want to deal with 3rd party FTP backup or anything like that.

Then it clicked, why not use Google Docs!

We created a directory structure like this:

This directory structure was decided on in case we ever get audited by the IRS. If we need to reference an AT&T charge from March 26, 2011 we would simply click on the 2011 year folder, open the AT&T folder then search for receipts by date. Simple!

But we ran into a problem, we had a very good record of all invoices, the directory structure was perfect for us and made it very easy to reference back, but we found that the average file size of each PDF invoice was about 100K in size, dealing with thousands of invoices a year, this can quickly become a problem with the 1GB storage capacity that comes with Google Docs. Sure we can purchase more, but why, when you can convert to Google Docs format and use unlimited storage space for free!

When you actually upload the file into Google Docs it will give you the option of converting your PDF files into a Google Docs format:


By doing this you will be able to save unlimited amounts of data on Google Apps, you will be centralizing your company receipts and essentially basing everything on the cloud. If you want to share specific invoices with certain employees within your organization Google Docs makes it easy to do that too.

Converting our accounting records to Google Docs was simply an example of how we use Google Docs for business, it’s certainly not the only thing we use it for. We’ve also used it to convert all of our other documents over to the cloud as well. The greatest advantage for us is that it allows for real time collaboration among employees from anywhere in the world. We have employees all across the US, Russia and India, so real time collaboration is very important to staying organized and efficient in communicating with our employees. We’ve made it a practice within our organization to no longer create documents locally on the computers, but to create them within Google Docs. We’ve almost completely cut out the use of Microsoft Office. Need to send a document to someone that’s not using Google Docs? Not a problem, simply save the file as a PDF or Microsoft Word document and voila!

We have 100% faith in the documents that we store on Google Apps, BUT, you just never know! So as an additional safe guard we use Buckupify.com, for $4.95 a month they will run a nightly backup all of your users’ Google Apps for businesses files which includes Mail, Docs, Calender, Sites and Contacts. In addition they will backup your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Picasa, Zoho and LinkedIn profiles as well. Visit www.backupify.com for more details, they integrate directly with Google Apps for business and it runs completely in the background, visit www.google.com/a to learn about Google Apps for business.

How Google has changed the way our organization is run

Today I realized that up until about 6 months ago, I've been stuck in the ice age when it comes to running my businesses, and how switching over to the Google Apps for Business, in addition to embracing several other Google products, has transformed the way our organization does business.

About 6 months ago one of my friends told me that I should start using Google Apps for Business. I was very skeptical, to say the least, about making the change, even during the first 2 weeks while I was using the trial, I actually wanted to cancel and go back to using Microsoft Office for our email solutions. Our company, Web Technologies, Inc. owns and operates several web based ventures, so it was very important for us to be able to configure multiple domains under one account, and Google Apps made this very easy to do.

Google Mail for Business: First and foremost, the most powerful feature within Google Apps for Business is the mail functionality. My entire skepticism about not wanting to change over to this platform was because of how Gmail groups emails (which can be disabled) and the fact that there are no more folders; everything is now a "Label." Needless to say, now that I've had some time to use both features extensively, I absolutely love both the grouping feature and labeling feature of Google Mail for Business. Another extremely powerful feature of Google Mail is the search feature, searches that would general take up to 5 minutes at times with Outlook (because of the Outlook file size) literally take seconds with Google Mail.

Google Docs for Business in conjunction with Memeo Connect: Up until yesterday, I had never used the Google Docs functionality that is included within all accounts. I simply didn't have any use for this function, until I found out about Memeo Connect. Memeo Connect is an application that works in conjunction with Google Docs, basically syncing all of your documents in the cloud in real time. For example, lets say you have a word document sitting on your desktop at the office and you just made a change to this document, the moment you press save, a copy of the file is saved locally on your office computer and also uploaded to your Google Docs account using the Memeo Connect application. The upload is done in the background without you having to do anything manually. Now when you go home and load your home PC, the most updated version with the latest changes that you made in the office, is also available on your home computer. Memeo Connect will work with your PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad devices. Visit the Memeo Connect website to learn more.

You simply will not find a more cost effective solution for your company. Google Apps for Business is only $50 a year per user. It comes with a 30 day free trial, so I would strongly recommend you give it a try, to learn more and get started visit the Google Apps for Business homepage.

Our company is now more productive, we never have to worry about losing data because of hard drive failures. All employees have access to everyone's public calendars, and we're able to collaborate and work on documents, spreadsheet and presentations in real time using the Google Docs tool, which, mind you, can in many respects completely replace Microsoft Office! Keep in mind that I've only touched on just a few of the features provided by Google Apps for Business. I would strongly recommend trying it out for yourself to understand the full benefits.

Thumbs up to Google!